Dino DNA

“Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should“

It all started 65 million years ago, or like, two or three when I drew the dinosaur sketch. I’ve been on a blender tutorial binge lately, and when I found this tutorial for a 3D T-Rex I couldn’t resist using one of my own dinos as a base.

The model section went pretty smooth, blender has some weird UX quirks which tripped me up a bit, but otherwise it really wasnt much different to how I’d go about modelling something like this in 3DS max.

My first pass on a texture didnt really feel friendly enough. The original sketch has a goofy quality about it, and I didnt want this dino to feel even a little scary. I also didnt want to spend hours drawing in details on the texture as that wasn’t the aim of the tutorial – I can focus on fancy textures later, for now I just wanted to get something basic done that still captures the essence of the character.

I took a look at songbirds and tropical frogs to try and find something which would be cute and friendly, but also naturalistic – no neon green scaly reptiles for me!

I ended up with something a little brighter and more simplified than my concepts.

The UV’s for this were kind of a mess, I followed the tutorial more closely than my own gut, so some parts particularly around the legs didnt match up or were stretched more than I’d like. It’s an easy fix in theory, just change the seams, tweak the UV til its not distorted – or unwrap it again, keeping the body as one block like a bearskin rug so there are no awkward joins – but I didnt want to dwell on that and start to redo things, I had no more time to spend on this lil dude.